Unfamiliar Familiar

It was everything and nothing all at once, you know?

My childhood home stands grand and castle-like, looks small, looks slanted. This can't be right, reality conflicts with memory, memory conflicts with imagination, imagination conflicts with emotion, and I am left standing on an empty street in front of a place I used to know.

The most unfamiliar familiar place I've ever visited, the home that is not my home, a remnant of something that once was but no longer is. Grand corridors and majestic halls alongside tiny windows and tight doorframes—that can't be right, can it?

I wasn't always this tall, I used to be small and the world used to be full of wonder and everything used to be something else that it no longer is and that house was once my home and I am standing outside joyful, mournful, laughing, crying.

I am pulled toward the house and pushed away from it simultaneously, the wonderful interaction between nostalgic lies and rational aversion. The house is beautiful and hideous, it must have looked better before, earlier, back when I had nothing to compare it to, back when it was just me and my imagination for hours and hours on end (until dinner was ready, that is).

Nothing makes sense, really, and so I am frozen, immobile, running faster than I ever have away from a past and toward a memory.